Pixar's Disneyfied 'Brave' Plays It Safe

Vampire 'Lincoln' has four score times more blood than brains; Allen's 'To Rome' goes off the grid

Determined to make her own path in life, Princess Merida defies a custom that brings chaos to her kingdom. Granted one wish, Merida must rely on her bravery and her archery skills to undo a beastly curse. Video courtesy of Pixar.

By

Joe Morgenstern

Updated June 21, 2012 6:56 p.m. ET

For the first time, in "Brave," Pixar has made an animated feature with a female protagonist—a young Scottish princess, Merida, with incendiary red hair, a sweetly independent swagger, a talent for archery and a thirst for adventure. That's a good first, and long overdue, but there's another one that isn't good at all. "Brave" is the first film under Pixar's banner that teaches life lessons through insistent preachments, instead of letting dramatic events speak for themselves. The most obvious lesson for Merida is to be careful what you wish for, since one of her wishes goes horribly wrong and turns her kingdom upside down, forcing her to find the bravery that will put things right. The most important lesson for the audience is to be clear about what you expect. This is less a film in the lustrous Pixar tradition than a Disney fairy tale told with Pixar's virtuosity. As such, it's enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.

ENLARGE

Merida, voiced by Kelly Macdonald, in 'Brave.'
Disney/Pixar

The issue of expectations is unavoidable since the film's marketing campaign, like the early passages of the film itself, suggests a feminist fable of a young warrior going off to fight her own battles—thus the iconic poster image of the heroine alone in a forest, bow and arrow at the ready. For a while Merida (voiced superbly by Kelly Macdonald) does indeed struggle against constraints that threaten her freedom: tight dresses, boobish suitors, arbitrary dictates of etiquette and, worst of all, a strict mother who insists that a princess should always strive for perfection. And Merida does make a break for it, on an escape route that takes her through spectacular settings—one memorable shot finds her standing tall atop a towering rock pedestal—then plunges her into a shady green glade, where blue will o' the wisps shimmer seductively.

Suddenly, however, the saga takes a sharp turn into witchery, wishes and a magical spell—a notably confusing spell prompted by vague plotting—and "Brave" becomes a story not of a rebellious daughter but of the bonds between daughter and mother in magical circumstances. The only thing I'll note of those circumstances is that they lead to encounters of genuine tenderness, humor and complexity, as well as affecting role-reversals in which the child takes care of the parent. So what's to be said against the familiar theme of a mother and daughter establishing a new relationship on the basis of new understandings? First off, the theme is at odds with what precedes it. And the familiarity breeds dismay, for the last thing we've come to expect from a Pixar film is tried-and-true, family-friendly formulations. (The voice cast includes Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Julie Walters and Robbie Coltrane.)

"Brave" was a notoriously troubled production, with a change of directors that clearly led to a change of narrative direction. (The complexity of the final credits reflects the tortuous history: directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman and co-directed by Steve Purcell, from a script written by Messrs. Andrews and Purcell, Ms. Chapman and Irene Mecchi.) That raises the question of how much this Disney-esque fable was influenced by Disney, which used to be Pixar's distributor and is now the studio's owner. There's no way to know, and it's certainly premature to panic about Pixar's fate. The studio that has given us such animated masterpieces as the "Toy Story" trilogy, "Finding Nemo" and "WALL•E" may well have a host of untold wonders in its pipeline. At the same time, though, there is reason to be concerned—not because of the failings of "Brave," which is a pleasant entertainment on its own terms, but because of the singular promise that Pixar represents in a dimming firmament of entertainment conglomerates.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, discovers vampires are planning to take over the United States. He makes it his mission to eliminate them. Video courtesy of Fox.

'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter'

If I understand this history lesson correctly, and I fear that I do, Honest Abe fitted his rail-splitting ax with a silver edge that was better suited to the vanquishing of vampires; the Civil War was fought over bodily fluids (the Confederate Army having been beefed up, so to speak, by vampires who valued the South's slaves as a source of blood), and the North's secret weapon was melted-down silverware. What I don't understand is why this extended piece of idiocy chose to sink its stinky teeth into our 16th president. If an axe-wielding hero was required, George Washington would have been the better choice, with the Redcoats as bloodsuckers.

Preposterous premises have been the basis of deathless classics, from "Metropolis" to "Planet of the Apes." The problem here isn't idiocy per se, but idiocy sans levity; someone forgot to tell the filmmakers—the director, Timur Bekmambetov, and his co-producer, Tim Burton—that the movie was supposed to be fun. Or at least smart. At certain points the script seems poised to develop a parallel between vampires and racists—the story is mainly set in the years before the Civil War—but that's pretty much lost in recurrent stampedes of slavering predators.

Fleeting rewards turn up from time to time: Benjamin Walker's Lincoln learning kung fu, or twirling his ax—the handle of which conceals a gun—like a demented drum major; Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Mary Todd standing on top of the stovepipe hat that Abe had dropped, in order to kiss him; a computer-generated vista of a foundry melting down the forks that will save the Union. But Anthony Mackie, one of America's finest actors, is utterly wasted in the role of Will Johnson, Lincoln's friend from childhood; there's only so much a star can do with banal material. And much as I tried to keep my sense of humor while watching a movie that has none, I lost it during a sequence that cuts between Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address and Union troops stabbing the vampires with you know what to win the battle.

'To Rome With Love'

For better or worse, Woody Allen turns out a movie every year. Last year's "Midnight in Paris" was better than better; that is to say, sublime. "To Rome With Love" is worse than worse, as inert as its predecessor was inspired. How to explain the inexplicable? For all we know the answer could be contractual—an obligation, if not to others then to himself, to go into production when he didn't have a movie worth doing.

Woody Allen directed this film that revolves around Italians, expats, and the romances, adventures and predicaments they get into in the "Eternal city". Video courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

What's on screen is a collection of clichés intermingled with outlandish farce or surreal fantasy. The clichés, starting with the title, seem to have been set forth in the hope that we would identify them as clichés but find them fragrant all the same: A young American tourist, for example, finds the Italian man of her dreams at the Trevi fountain. The farce elements excel only in ineptitude. In one, Italian newlyweds arrive from the provinces, then lose track of each other for an implausible reason with disastrous results. The surrealism is perpetrated mainly by Roberto Benigni, insufferably self-enchanted in the role of a Roman nobody who suddenly finds himself a prime celebrity. The fantasy turns on Alec Baldwin as an American architect revisiting a Roman neighborhood where he lived as an ardent young man. Hovering over the action like the stage manager in "Our Town," the architect tries to cut through the pretensions of three young lovers, but that only makes the prevailing pretentiousness more intense.

The cast, as almost always in Mr. Allen's films, is an extraordinary one that includes Penélope Cruz, Judy Davis, Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig, Jesse Eisenberg and the filmmaker himself, who appears to be playing a bad version of one of the many surrogates who have played him annoyingly. The cinematographer was the excellent Darius Khondji, whose work is often distinguished by deep, burnished tones. In the spirit of this enterprise, the tone is indiscriminately bright.

'Toy Story 2' (1999)

Some troubled productions remain so, their flaws all too evident in the final product. This one turned out to be a triumph, the rare sequel that transcends a great original. Like "Brave," the second part of the "Toy Story" trilogy suffered from serious script problems. Unlike "Brave," the production was shut down, the script was junked and Pixar's writers got a new script right, and then some. The director, John Lasseter, and his co-directors Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich, worked from a screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin and Chris Webb.

'The Hurt Locker' (2008)

Anthony Mackie is Sgt. JT Sanborn, one of three members of a bomb squad at the focal point of Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning drama, which was written by Mark Boal; the others are played by Jeremy Renner and Brian Geraghty. The film manages to be many things at once—a first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq and a penetrating study of heroism. Most of all, though, it is, as I wrote when it came out, an instant classic that demonstrates how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can't kick the habit.

'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' (2010)

Coming after the delightful "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and before "Midnight in Paris," Woody Allen's small-scale charmer, set in London, is a comic roundelay of amorous ambitions and delusions that lead mostly but not entirely to disaster. The cast of characters is small, and largely screwy. One couple is played by Anthony Hopkins and the enchanting Gemma Jones; the other by Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin. It's touching to watch everyone's struggles, and instructive to discover that the screwiest people on screen are the only ones who find true happiness.

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